What we need to do is publish the executives and lawyers personal information along with SSNs and credit card numbers publicly, after all, it's the truth and therefore free speech!
While we are at it, why don't we require wiretaps for all of the members of any government or private entities with more than five people working for them? Don't the phone companies have a right to publish that? Isn't their civic duty to report every possible wrong doing, so we can all take action? Congresmen, CEO's and other who have such a large impact should be required to carry cell phones everywhere with the camera and sound recording. Imagine a Congressional Record with transcripts of that! Further, our children should be coached in how to listen and report suspicious activity.
Winston, what are you doing in the corner? You know I don't like it when I can't see you! It makes me feel less safe.
Without specific protection for the software component, companies would have tied software to the hardware.... You can copy the Microsoft Office ROMS all you want, but it uses the registers and I/O devices only present on the patented Microsoft Office machine. No *general purpose* computers... Copyright is what made the general purpose computer sociologically possible. That world, by the way, would suck.
That's so backward - general purpose computers are more valuable without copy restrictions than they are with them. There are plenty of patents on them but no computer maker would ever limit the use of their hardware with those patents. Copy restrictions are responsible for the dominance of Intel i386 and all companies have twisted their hardware to work with M$ junk and is close to the M$ Office machine you mention. Useful hardware like PowerPC and other general purpose hardware is not available for home normal use. In a world without copyright, one where Bill Gates was stoned to death at an early hacker meeting, M$ would never have existed much less made hardware even suckier than it is today.
It only takes charisma and a big mouth and the whole OSS community could be corrupted. Some would argue it's already happening.
You also need talent, just like you need to penetrate a non free company.
Then there are multiple layers where malice is weeded out and non free software only shares one or two of them. First you have to screw things upstream. It would be hard to sneak something malicious past your peers working on the same program and their testers. Then you have to get it past the distribution maintainers and their testers. There are so many of these that this is virtually impossible. Next you would have to get it passed all the people who actually use the program on stable release. The non free software world, has only two of these layers but far fewer reviewers and much less transparency. Fewer checks means it's easier to get things through.
Real world experience backs my assertion up. There have been plenty of viruses and backdoors that made it to the customer in the non free world but I don't think you can show me any in the free software world.
Well actually they do, but call it "extraordinary rendition" instead.
and Germany co-operated with it. I'm not sure if they got any actual German citizens, but I do know the US exported people from Germany. Some were sent to places like Syria for torture.
What would life on the Internet be without scriptable office documents/spreadsheets, email, web sites, and be like? A whole lot safer, regardless of the Operating System.
Mixing executable code and data is a bad idea but it can and has been done with sandboxes on real OS with real users and privilege separation.
There are many other significant differences between free and non free software that have an operational impact. Some of the more obvious ones are:
GNU/Linux has many distributions - there will be no dominant vendor.
Different distributions, while data and GUI compatible, have package and compile choice - they are completely different binary beasts.
All of the distributions come with a much better security model, architecture and defaults than Widoze will ever know - No auto execute, no mixed data/executable, ports that only listen when you turn on a service, extensive documentation, real users and privilege separation, this list goes on and on.
Every install can be the newest available because changes rarely break anything.
Security updates come from one location, within days or hours of a problem, and are easy to push through any organization.
Binary disaster recovery without obnoxious licensing, registry settings and all of that, is trivial. Applications all install squeaky clean and at the latest stable revision.
Strict separation of user data from binary and system settings makes backing up and restoring user data easy. The user gets back everthing they had.
He's just attempting to up magazine subscriptions.
Yeah, but the author is so wrong about so much that the little CW with a yellow background associated with him is now equivalent to dog poop in my mind. Subscribe? You have to be crazy.
I agree with what you say and have these explanations for your and my own observations. These differences are telling:
GNU/Linux has many distributions - there will be no dominant vendor.
Different distributions, while data and GUI compatible, have package and compile choice - they are completely different binary beasts.
All of the distributions come with a much better security model, architecture and defaults than Widoze will ever know - No auto execute, no mixed data/executable, ports that only listen when you turn on a service, extensive documentation, real users and privilege separation, this list goes on and on.
Every install can be the newest available because changes rarely break anything.
Security updates come from one location, within days or hours of a problem, and are easy to push through any organization.
Binary disaster recovery without obnoxious licensing, registry settings and all of that, is trivial. Applications all install squeaky clean and at the latest stable revision.
Strict separation of user data from binary and system settings makes backing up and restoring user data easy. The user gets back everthing they had.
The net result of these differences is that it's much harder to screw over a GNU/Linux system, where it's hard to avoid the same for Windows. There are no successful auto-propagating worms for GNU/Linux in the wild. It takes a dedicated attack to penetrate a GNU/Linux system and an organization that uses it and recovery is much easier. Oh, it happens and operators have to be on their toes, but it will never, ever be as bad as the M$ monopoly or even their replacement with two or three other non free vendors.
The final and usual problem with the "popularity argument" so loosly thrown around the Wintel press is one of perspective. FUD is never for decision making - you always have to choose what works best right now. Choosing what does not work best because you think someting else may never be better only gives you something that's second rate and may never be any better. In this case the difference between the two on security is so enormous that FUD, based on projecting their own poor performance, is all the M$ camp has to offer.
publish and widely distribute a secret code used by the technology and movie industries to prevent piracy of high-definition movies.
He not only distorts the aim of digital restrictions, he's advertising and promoting newer movie formats. People who use MPAA language aid the MPAA whether they want to or not. The easiest way to foil the "anti-piracy" talk is to point out the failure of DeCSS. Commercial shops will have no problem making and selling exact coppies. Exact coppies can also be made and sent over the internet by normal users. Encryption and restrictions serve only to thwart fair use.
... there is nothing you would not be able to do with your computer. Binary blobs are nasty, but they would not stop you from doing what you wanted if they could be freely shared. Freely sharing them would also make them easier to reverse engineer.
Seen through the lens of freedom, the issue is simple. The GPL's goal is to preserver your software freedoms: to do as you please with your computer, to modify the way your computer works and to be able to share these things with your neighbors. Copyright stands in the way of your doing that by keeping you from sharing your software or even details about how it works. It is against everything the GPL stands for. Newer nastier laws and restrictions should not make you a friend of older nasty restrictions.
New and more abominable laws like the DMCA make copyright look preferable, but it's really more of the same. You can't watch commercial DVD movies on GNU/Linux easily because the DMCA makes it illegal to share DeCSS, free software which decrypts them. If it were not for the DMCA, there would be no problem. Going further, it would not matter if some dumb company took free software, wrapped it up in DRM and sold it back to you if the DRM could be removed legally. The GPL has new clauses to fight new attempts to nullify previous incarnations of the GPL. The copyright holder's goals are still the same, to keep users helpless and divided, and none of it justifies the original offense of copyright.
The author is also using the old emotional attachment argument for free software to justify copyrights restrictions but it falls down with a moment's thought. I don't care if a big dumb software company uses my software as long as they don't use it to rob other people of their rights. In a world without copyright restrictions they could not do that. Indeed, I'd be happy if other people used my code and that includes people at big dumb companies.
Rational laws would keep to the spirit of the US Constitution which allowed copyright to promote the arts and spread culture. They would not keep you from sharing software with your neighbor or watching movies any more than they would keep you from sharing recipes.
If you visit the gnu.org philosophy pages, you find hatred of copyright from consist moral principles. The idea is that keeping people from copying things that are easy to copy is morally wrong:
When software owners tell us that helping our neighbors in a natural way is piracy, they pollute our society's civic spirit.
This is the original spirit of the GPL, which was used copyright laws to assure freedoms that some copyright owners want to abolish.
Not much has changed. The GPL has been extended to fight new menaces, like DRM and patents, which strip you of your freedoms even if you have free software, source code and all the requirements of GPL2. Despite this extension, the GPL would not be required if it were not for copyright laws. Without the DMCA, you could freely modify Tivo and make it your own again and there would be no problems. The proponents of copyright have made new abominable laws to deny your freedoms, this has not made the old abominable laws right or necessary.
If your intention is to assure users their freedom, you will use the GPL. That won't make you a friend of copyright, it will make you an advocate of freedom.
She crawled to the police covered in wounds, and they ordered the husband to stay away from her. He refused. He terrorised her with death threats.
So Nishal went to the courts to request an early divorce, hoping that once they were no longer married he would leave her alone. A judge who believed in the rights of women would find it very easy to make a judgement: you're free from this man, case dismissed
I have to wonder why the man was not in jail for assault, contempt of court and all of that. There are a lot of failures in that case, but the fundamental one was to offer her the protection of the law and the ability to live her life with dignity and control. The same kind of failing was originally used to justify abortion in the US: women were put upon by their husbands and the only protection society had to offer was the choice of carrying the baby or not.
From the link you gave, he's the worst of the lot:
Except for Sarkozy, the candidates also agreed that consumers should have the right to buy a computer without any preloaded software,... Sarkozy was also the only candidate who responded with obvious hostility, remarking when talking about DADVSI that "I am opposed to the orientations implied by your questions."
He expresses his support for patent law on the grounds that it "encourages enterprises to innovate, it attracts investments, [and] encourages individuals to... develop new inventions." In addition, Sarkozy supported the concept of intellectual property, and suggested that it was premature to talk about revising DADVSI before the end of 2007, when a review is scheduled. In answer to the question about open standards and free software, he replied that "it is not the purpose of the State, in my concept of freedom, to impose a model on anyone." Other replies were so general as to suggest that he either had not considered the matter or was avoiding stating his position. As Frédéric Couchet, a director of APRIL commented, Sarkozy's "was the worst response received."
Not that that's the most important quality in a president, but it would have been nice.
If standing up for French companies and citizens by supporting their software freedom is not important, I'm not sure what is. Your computer is your press, your store of important information and your telcom all rolled into one. No modern state can live without them and their security and ownership are tantamount to independence. Does he want CIA planted backdoors in his office?
Sarkozy is seen as a divisive figure for his demand that immigrants learn Western values (and the French language).
Some of that is good. There has been some very bad "multiculturalism" case law in the EU recently, where women have been beaten and abused but that was OK because it was supposedly "their" culture and the host country should not interfere. This makes a mockery of the foreign culture as well as allowing injustice. It is right for France, and every other country, to demand respect and offer protection for all of their citizens. Injustice and brutality should not be tolerated anywhere. Doing so in the name of "in my country we put woman in cage" is racism in disguise.
Visual Basic 1.0 had just come out, and it was pretty friggin' cool.
It's hard to believe anything after that, but the bit about how Bill wanted the new thing to exactly conform to software written for 640K of RAM without rational dates or timezones sounds right.
He was flipping through the spec! [Calm down, what are you a little girl?]... He Read The Whole Thing! [OMG SQUEEE!]
That's what it takes, I suppose. No thanks, I'd rather be free to do things the way I want them done.
his management style is/was, a key ingredient in its success may have been in the fact that he's a really smart guy who wants to be convinced of why your ideas are right, and while he's a tough customer, he can be convinced.
There were several key ingredients to the M$ success but treating employees like shit is not one of them. Bill came from a rich family and was obsessive. Where a normal person might spend their youth pleasing themselves with relatively unlimited resources, Mr. Gates created M$Basic. His big break came from IBM, which propelled DoS and then Windoze to dominance. The only place his asshole nature did M$ any good is the way he treated competitors but the end of the story has yet to be written.
No one else has won, and that's a situation that never lasts long. Family connections and piles of money have helped shield him from the consequences of his antisocial attitude. Most people get tired of that unless they like groveling before insecure dick heads. He has done two decade's worth of harm to industry, laws and morals of the world and the results are more obvious every day.
People who treat others like shit prove they lack forsight, not how smart they are. What goes around, comes around. You can get the same immediate results with better manners and willpower that's built on intelligence rather than insecurity and cruelty. The backlash is growing.
Invented? only if you consider a second rate and late implementation an invention. Instead of sharing the same OS between two users, they had to license each half of the screen, how typical. MagicTwin did for XP what LTSP did for GNU/Linux and it actually worked. Perhaps in a world where screens cost more than the computer itself this makes sense, otherwise it's a real loser. I can imagine trying to split the average 1024 by 768 screen right down the middle and so can you. Just half your browser right now and see how well it works.
OLPC is better still. The software is all free, so you don't have to crowd everyone into a lab where they have to "share" non free junk like Bill wants. At less than $200, it may be cheaper than some screens. Everyone gets their own and gets to keep their privacy and dignity.
So a throwaway 'Homer' reference isn't funny, but blatant racism is?
Hmmm, I would not go so far as to call people who work for M$ a "race" so I don't know what you are talking about. M$ people are strange, but in theory they can still produce viable offspring when mated with other human beings.
... my concerns about anyone named Homer being involved in the space program?
How can you be so crass and shallow? This is a heartbreaking story.
My concern is how this award winning design engineer with 10 years of experience is unemployed. It is obvious that he did better than the industry and teams of competitors. There is something very wrong with the US aerospace industry.
This is bad for everyone. It's especially bad for those in the profession. They face the frustration of not getting things done and an uncertain future, regardless of merit or how hard they work. It's bad for the US that piles of money thrown without results at the federal government, contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and NASA. It's bad for the world that the one remaining superpower is using it's resources to secure oil instead of the boundless riches of the solar system and galaxy. The goal and it's practitioners deserve more respect.
The good news is that the contest worked and the industry may reform into a more efficient and rewarding place. $200,000 is a fine prize that may make up for the years Peter Homer has not been able to practice his profession. It's not enough to form a proper company but others with talent will be encouraged. Hopefully, they will be rewarded better than having their name laughed at.
Even using the inappropriate "survival in the business world" model, non free software is worthless to students because it's changed by the time the students actually enter the workforce. Mathematica is the only application on your list that might help students learn basic concepts, all the rest are worthless in school. School is a place for learning basic concepts. Familiarizing students with expensive software packages used for business purposes is a waste of both time and money. When it's your time and money, you can bore you kids with AutoCAD all you like, but don't expect me to pay for it or waste my kids time that way.
The software I mentioned is all concerned with learning. It was designed to presents basic facts and concepts in an interesting and interactive way. There are tools for rote learning and others for research and exploration. All of it is free and useful.
Honestly, I find it disturbing (if not downright pathetic) that someone would dismiss a product like Encarta (especially when it was first released) just because it comes from Microsoft.
There's very little honest about you, Bungi, especially your projections. I said Encarta was inferior to printed encyclopedias because it was and still is. They made if from a subset of Funk & Wagnalls, and modified facts to pander to different demographics. At the time, it was an interesting toy for those who had the money, but that money was better spent on other encyclopedias. Wikipedia, Google and free dictionaires leave it in the dirt so it's now irrelevant.
Still, though, OS X's decent battery life gives the lie to the idea that "it's a processor-intensive process. Duh." If the Aero interface is eating battery, then why isn't Aqua, which is just as full of eye candy?
Probably because Aqua and X are more efficient than Aero and all the DRM nonsense that M$ has put into Vista. You don't have to do the user any good while you spin their processor. Enlightenment, KDE and Gnome also have nice eye candy without cost to battery life.
Slashdot Mirror
What we need to do is publish the executives and lawyers personal information along with SSNs and credit card numbers publicly, after all, it's the truth and therefore free speech!
While we are at it, why don't we require wiretaps for all of the members of any government or private entities with more than five people working for them? Don't the phone companies have a right to publish that? Isn't their civic duty to report every possible wrong doing, so we can all take action? Congresmen, CEO's and other who have such a large impact should be required to carry cell phones everywhere with the camera and sound recording. Imagine a Congressional Record with transcripts of that! Further, our children should be coached in how to listen and report suspicious activity.
Winston, what are you doing in the corner? You know I don't like it when I can't see you! It makes me feel less safe.
Without specific protection for the software component, companies would have tied software to the hardware. ... You can copy the Microsoft Office ROMS all you want, but it uses the registers and I/O devices only present on the patented Microsoft Office machine. No *general purpose* computers... Copyright is what made the general purpose computer sociologically possible. That world, by the way, would suck.
That's so backward - general purpose computers are more valuable without copy restrictions than they are with them. There are plenty of patents on them but no computer maker would ever limit the use of their hardware with those patents. Copy restrictions are responsible for the dominance of Intel i386 and all companies have twisted their hardware to work with M$ junk and is close to the M$ Office machine you mention. Useful hardware like PowerPC and other general purpose hardware is not available for home normal use. In a world without copyright, one where Bill Gates was stoned to death at an early hacker meeting, M$ would never have existed much less made hardware even suckier than it is today.
Is it OK for me to take a bike propped up against a fence and give it to them, because helping my neighbour in the natural way is theft?
No, but it would be fine if you could duplicate the bike. Copy is not theft.
It only takes charisma and a big mouth and the whole OSS community could be corrupted. Some would argue it's already happening.
You also need talent, just like you need to penetrate a non free company.
Then there are multiple layers where malice is weeded out and non free software only shares one or two of them. First you have to screw things upstream. It would be hard to sneak something malicious past your peers working on the same program and their testers. Then you have to get it past the distribution maintainers and their testers. There are so many of these that this is virtually impossible. Next you would have to get it passed all the people who actually use the program on stable release. The non free software world, has only two of these layers but far fewer reviewers and much less transparency. Fewer checks means it's easier to get things through.
Real world experience backs my assertion up. There have been plenty of viruses and backdoors that made it to the customer in the non free world but I don't think you can show me any in the free software world.
Well actually they do, but call it "extraordinary rendition" instead.
and Germany co-operated with it. I'm not sure if they got any actual German citizens, but I do know the US exported people from Germany. Some were sent to places like Syria for torture.
What would life on the Internet be without scriptable office documents/spreadsheets, email, web sites, and be like? A whole lot safer, regardless of the Operating System.
Mixing executable code and data is a bad idea but it can and has been done with sandboxes on real OS with real users and privilege separation.
There are many other significant differences between free and non free software that have an operational impact. Some of the more obvious ones are:
He's just attempting to up magazine subscriptions.
Yeah, but the author is so wrong about so much that the little CW with a yellow background associated with him is now equivalent to dog poop in my mind. Subscribe? You have to be crazy.
Things would be no better with any company having Microsofts history ...
Good thing free software is something users can control and will always be dominated by those with a fighting spirit. The differences are real.
I agree with what you say and have these explanations for your and my own observations. These differences are telling:
The net result of these differences is that it's much harder to screw over a GNU/Linux system, where it's hard to avoid the same for Windows. There are no successful auto-propagating worms for GNU/Linux in the wild. It takes a dedicated attack to penetrate a GNU/Linux system and an organization that uses it and recovery is much easier. Oh, it happens and operators have to be on their toes, but it will never, ever be as bad as the M$ monopoly or even their replacement with two or three other non free vendors.
The final and usual problem with the "popularity argument" so loosly thrown around the Wintel press is one of perspective. FUD is never for decision making - you always have to choose what works best right now. Choosing what does not work best because you think someting else may never be better only gives you something that's second rate and may never be any better. In this case the difference between the two on security is so enormous that FUD, based on projecting their own poor performance, is all the M$ camp has to offer.
publish and widely distribute a secret code used by the technology and movie industries to prevent piracy of high-definition movies.
He not only distorts the aim of digital restrictions, he's advertising and promoting newer movie formats. People who use MPAA language aid the MPAA whether they want to or not. The easiest way to foil the "anti-piracy" talk is to point out the failure of DeCSS. Commercial shops will have no problem making and selling exact coppies. Exact coppies can also be made and sent over the internet by normal users. Encryption and restrictions serve only to thwart fair use.
... there is nothing you would not be able to do with your computer. Binary blobs are nasty, but they would not stop you from doing what you wanted if they could be freely shared. Freely sharing them would also make them easier to reverse engineer.
Seen through the lens of freedom, the issue is simple. The GPL's goal is to preserver your software freedoms: to do as you please with your computer, to modify the way your computer works and to be able to share these things with your neighbors. Copyright stands in the way of your doing that by keeping you from sharing your software or even details about how it works. It is against everything the GPL stands for. Newer nastier laws and restrictions should not make you a friend of older nasty restrictions.
New and more abominable laws like the DMCA make copyright look preferable, but it's really more of the same. You can't watch commercial DVD movies on GNU/Linux easily because the DMCA makes it illegal to share DeCSS, free software which decrypts them. If it were not for the DMCA, there would be no problem. Going further, it would not matter if some dumb company took free software, wrapped it up in DRM and sold it back to you if the DRM could be removed legally. The GPL has new clauses to fight new attempts to nullify previous incarnations of the GPL. The copyright holder's goals are still the same, to keep users helpless and divided, and none of it justifies the original offense of copyright.
The author is also using the old emotional attachment argument for free software to justify copyrights restrictions but it falls down with a moment's thought. I don't care if a big dumb software company uses my software as long as they don't use it to rob other people of their rights. In a world without copyright restrictions they could not do that. Indeed, I'd be happy if other people used my code and that includes people at big dumb companies.
Rational laws would keep to the spirit of the US Constitution which allowed copyright to promote the arts and spread culture. They would not keep you from sharing software with your neighbor or watching movies any more than they would keep you from sharing recipes.
If you visit the gnu.org philosophy pages, you find hatred of copyright from consist moral principles. The idea is that keeping people from copying things that are easy to copy is morally wrong:
When software owners tell us that helping our neighbors in a natural way is piracy, they pollute our society's civic spirit.
This is the original spirit of the GPL, which was used copyright laws to assure freedoms that some copyright owners want to abolish.
Not much has changed. The GPL has been extended to fight new menaces, like DRM and patents, which strip you of your freedoms even if you have free software, source code and all the requirements of GPL2. Despite this extension, the GPL would not be required if it were not for copyright laws. Without the DMCA, you could freely modify Tivo and make it your own again and there would be no problems. The proponents of copyright have made new abominable laws to deny your freedoms, this has not made the old abominable laws right or necessary.
If your intention is to assure users their freedom, you will use the GPL. That won't make you a friend of copyright, it will make you an advocate of freedom.
Thanks for the article. It says:
I have to wonder why the man was not in jail for assault, contempt of court and all of that. There are a lot of failures in that case, but the fundamental one was to offer her the protection of the law and the ability to live her life with dignity and control. The same kind of failing was originally used to justify abortion in the US: women were put upon by their husbands and the only protection society had to offer was the choice of carrying the baby or not.
It's not the votes that count. It's who counts the votes.
-Josef Stalin
more of the same.
All the same, it's nice to know someone's election has it's integrity.
Nicolas Sarkozy is a lawyer ... behind the introduction of voting machines without paper trail requirements ...
Now you know how he won. If any of you saw the name "Edwin Edwards" anywhere, the machine came from Louisiana.
From the link you gave, he's the worst of the lot:
Except for Sarkozy, the candidates also agreed that consumers should have the right to buy a computer without any preloaded software, ... Sarkozy was also the only candidate who responded with obvious hostility, remarking when talking about DADVSI that "I am opposed to the orientations implied by your questions."
He expresses his support for patent law on the grounds that it "encourages enterprises to innovate, it attracts investments, [and] encourages individuals to ... develop new inventions." In addition, Sarkozy supported the concept of intellectual property, and suggested that it was premature to talk about revising DADVSI before the end of 2007, when a review is scheduled. In answer to the question about open standards and free software, he replied that "it is not the purpose of the State, in my concept of freedom, to impose a model on anyone." Other replies were so general as to suggest that he either had not considered the matter or was avoiding stating his position. As Frédéric Couchet, a director of APRIL commented, Sarkozy's "was the worst response received."
You can read his response yourself, but the above is bad news.
Not that that's the most important quality in a president, but it would have been nice.
If standing up for French companies and citizens by supporting their software freedom is not important, I'm not sure what is. Your computer is your press, your store of important information and your telcom all rolled into one. No modern state can live without them and their security and ownership are tantamount to independence. Does he want CIA planted backdoors in his office?
Sarkozy is seen as a divisive figure for his demand that immigrants learn Western values (and the French language).
Some of that is good. There has been some very bad "multiculturalism" case law in the EU recently, where women have been beaten and abused but that was OK because it was supposedly "their" culture and the host country should not interfere. This makes a mockery of the foreign culture as well as allowing injustice. It is right for France, and every other country, to demand respect and offer protection for all of their citizens. Injustice and brutality should not be tolerated anywhere. Doing so in the name of "in my country we put woman in cage" is racism in disguise.
It's hard to believe anything after that, but the bit about how Bill wanted the new thing to exactly conform to software written for 640K of RAM without rational dates or timezones sounds right.
That's what it takes, I suppose. No thanks, I'd rather be free to do things the way I want them done.
his management style is/was, a key ingredient in its success may have been in the fact that he's a really smart guy who wants to be convinced of why your ideas are right, and while he's a tough customer, he can be convinced.
There were several key ingredients to the M$ success but treating employees like shit is not one of them. Bill came from a rich family and was obsessive. Where a normal person might spend their youth pleasing themselves with relatively unlimited resources, Mr. Gates created M$Basic. His big break came from IBM, which propelled DoS and then Windoze to dominance. The only place his asshole nature did M$ any good is the way he treated competitors but the end of the story has yet to be written.
No one else has won, and that's a situation that never lasts long. Family connections and piles of money have helped shield him from the consequences of his antisocial attitude. Most people get tired of that unless they like groveling before insecure dick heads. He has done two decade's worth of harm to industry, laws and morals of the world and the results are more obvious every day.
People who treat others like shit prove they lack forsight, not how smart they are. What goes around, comes around. You can get the same immediate results with better manners and willpower that's built on intelligence rather than insecurity and cruelty. The backlash is growing.
So I guess Mr. Gates isn't responsible for everything wrong at Microsoft ... it's the people who didn't listen to his good judgment. ;-)
That's the dumbest fucking thing I've seen since I've been at Slashdot.
Oh wait, that's a joke. Never mind, but I'm still not responsible for anything but your success.
Invented? only if you consider a second rate and late implementation an invention. Instead of sharing the same OS between two users, they had to license each half of the screen, how typical. MagicTwin did for XP what LTSP did for GNU/Linux and it actually worked. Perhaps in a world where screens cost more than the computer itself this makes sense, otherwise it's a real loser. I can imagine trying to split the average 1024 by 768 screen right down the middle and so can you. Just half your browser right now and see how well it works.
OLPC is better still. The software is all free, so you don't have to crowd everyone into a lab where they have to "share" non free junk like Bill wants. At less than $200, it may be cheaper than some screens. Everyone gets their own and gets to keep their privacy and dignity.
So a throwaway 'Homer' reference isn't funny, but blatant racism is?
Hmmm, I would not go so far as to call people who work for M$ a "race" so I don't know what you are talking about. M$ people are strange, but in theory they can still produce viable offspring when mated with other human beings.
How can you be so crass and shallow? This is a heartbreaking story.
My concern is how this award winning design engineer with 10 years of experience is unemployed. It is obvious that he did better than the industry and teams of competitors. There is something very wrong with the US aerospace industry.
This is bad for everyone. It's especially bad for those in the profession. They face the frustration of not getting things done and an uncertain future, regardless of merit or how hard they work. It's bad for the US that piles of money thrown without results at the federal government, contractors like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and NASA. It's bad for the world that the one remaining superpower is using it's resources to secure oil instead of the boundless riches of the solar system and galaxy. The goal and it's practitioners deserve more respect.
The good news is that the contest worked and the industry may reform into a more efficient and rewarding place. $200,000 is a fine prize that may make up for the years Peter Homer has not been able to practice his profession. It's not enough to form a proper company but others with talent will be encouraged. Hopefully, they will be rewarded better than having their name laughed at.
Even using the inappropriate "survival in the business world" model, non free software is worthless to students because it's changed by the time the students actually enter the workforce. Mathematica is the only application on your list that might help students learn basic concepts, all the rest are worthless in school. School is a place for learning basic concepts. Familiarizing students with expensive software packages used for business purposes is a waste of both time and money. When it's your time and money, you can bore you kids with AutoCAD all you like, but don't expect me to pay for it or waste my kids time that way.
The software I mentioned is all concerned with learning. It was designed to presents basic facts and concepts in an interesting and interactive way. There are tools for rote learning and others for research and exploration. All of it is free and useful.
Honestly, I find it disturbing (if not downright pathetic) that someone would dismiss a product like Encarta (especially when it was first released) just because it comes from Microsoft.
There's very little honest about you, Bungi, especially your projections. I said Encarta was inferior to printed encyclopedias because it was and still is. They made if from a subset of Funk & Wagnalls, and modified facts to pander to different demographics. At the time, it was an interesting toy for those who had the money, but that money was better spent on other encyclopedias. Wikipedia, Google and free dictionaires leave it in the dirt so it's now irrelevant.
Still, though, OS X's decent battery life gives the lie to the idea that "it's a processor-intensive process. Duh." If the Aero interface is eating battery, then why isn't Aqua, which is just as full of eye candy?
Probably because Aqua and X are more efficient than Aero and all the DRM nonsense that M$ has put into Vista. You don't have to do the user any good while you spin their processor. Enlightenment, KDE and Gnome also have nice eye candy without cost to battery life.